All Jack Reacher wants is a cup of coffee when he stops in a small town in Colorado. What he gets instead is big trouble. In Child''s #1 "New York Times" bestseller, Reacher goes to war against a town that not only wants him gone, it wants him dead.

From the Publisher:Two small towns in the middle of nowhere: Hope and Despair. Between them, nothing but twelve miles of empty road. Jack Reacher can't find a ride, so he walks. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets are four hostile locals, a vagrancy charge, and an order to move on. They're picking on the wrong guy.

Reacher is a hard man. No job, no address, no baggage. Nothing at all, except hardheaded curiosity. What are the secrets that Despair seems so desperate to hide? With just one ally-a mysterious woman cop from Hope-and many enemies, Reacher goes up against a whole town, hunting the rich man at its core, cracking open his terrifying agenda, asking the question: Who has the edge-a man with everything to gain, or a man with nothing to lose?

Annotation:When Jack Reacher comes into the town of Despair, Colorado looking for a cup of coffee he instead gets beat up and thrown in jail. Readers of the previous 11 Reacher novels by Lee Childs will know that Despair just made a serious mistake. Aided by a beautiful lady cop from the neighboring town of Hope, Reacher returns to Despair and unleashes hell on the villains of the town, and in the process he uncovers a nefarious plot that involves a huge underground complex, the Iraqi war, and two missing young men.

Author Bio

Lee Child

Lee Child is the man behind Jack Reacher, a six-foot-five-inch drifter and ex-military policeman who has been featured in more than a dozen best-selling thrillers. Child, who stands the same height as the hero of his series, was born in Coventry, England, and raised in the nearby working-class city of Birmingham. He began his career as a producer with Granada, the television company responsible for such shows as THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN and BRIDESHEAD REVISITED. In 1995, when he was 40, he was laid off due to a corporate restructuring. He used his unexpected free time to write the first Reacher novel, KILLING FLOOR, which was published in 1997. The book, which won an Anthony Award for best debut of the year, proved exceptionally popular, and Child now has millions of avid fans. Child once said of his protagonist, "I look at the character as an update of a very old figure, who comes out of 1,000 years of literary tradition: the loner, the mysterious stranger, the knight errant who shows up, solves a problem and then leaves. He came out of Scandinavian sagas and English tales of knights and survived into the American West and pop lit." Explaining why Reacher's adventures take place in the U.S., Child, who is married to an American woman, has said, "The idea of writing against a huge landscape, a vast continent where anything could happen, greatly appealed to me."

Praise

"Stupendous....Mr. Child's books, like Hitchcock's films, inspire a hard-won confidence: every detail, no matter how minor, has been put into play for a reason....[They are] hugely, deservedly popular....[Jack Reacher is] one of the most enduring action heroes on the American landscape." - Janet Maslin 06/02/2008